Kickstarter

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Kickstarter is probably the most well known crowd-funding website in existence. Basically, here you can obtain money for any creative project[1] you have by submitting a description of your project (usually alongside a shot video) and promising rewards to people who "pledge" different amounts.

While the site has enjoyed a reasonable success beforehand, in February 2012 everything changed: not only did an iPhone dock become the first project to raise a million dollars, but legendary game developer Tim Schafer announced he was going to raise money for a new adventure game. Said project ended up raising over 3 million, with 1 million raised in a single day. The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive also joined the +1 million club the same month.

Schaefer's success then caused a large number of game developers to turn to Kickstarter and popularized the crowd-funding concept to a new height.

Notable Kickstarter projects include:
  • Successes
  • Failures (Either canceled or folded)
    • Ouya (The most successful project at the time. People were disappointed with the under-performing console and the lacking games. The company later went bankrupt, and its assets were sold off to Razer.)
    • Yogventures (Canceled after creatives troubles, budget issues and bankruptcy.)
    • Red Ash: The Indelible Legend (Will be published regardless)
    • RetroBlazer
    • Rampage 3 (After previous failed funding attempts on Indiegogo and Kickstarter, Uwe Boll posted an infamous video rant on YouTube insulting his non-backers.[2])
Kickstarter provides examples of the following tropes:
  • All or Nothing: If an "All or Nothing" project doesn't get the required funding, it gets nothing.
  • Follow the Leader: While Kickstarter had hosted hundreds of gaming projects before Tim Schafer, Double Fine Adventure caused several high profile developers to join in. It also paved the way for much more expensive projects: before DFA getting over 100k on Kickstarter was a bit of a stretch, now several projects have tried and succeeded getting money around and over the 500k range.
  • Sturgeon's Law: Most submissions are really bad and are typically not funded at all.


  1. ↑ stuff like founding businesses, charities, etc, are not allowed, but businesses can and do use Kickstarter to fund "limited edition" runs of creative works that they publish
  2. ↑ Bloody Disgusting article
  3. ↑ Star Citizen/Squadron 42 and Cloud Imperium Games are mostly controversial for missing every promised deadline (2014... 2016... 2018...) and due to their most impressive technical feats being the upscaling of features and content that other games successfully implemented on a smaller scale first (rather than anything truly innovative). As of Alpha 3.21, it is in fact possible to explore an entire star system using 90% of the roster of previously announced ships and land vehicles, but most gamers are still of the perception that the game has made no progress at all.
  4. ↑ To be fair to Cloud Imperium Games, the efforts of a disgruntled and obsessive ex-fan from Brazil cooperating with a rival of the CEO/Founder in the early days of the project to sabotage it purely using false accusations, the existence of an actual scam "game" ("Star Atlas") that stole the business model and just added the promise of NFTs for spaceships clearly composed of parts stolen from Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen vehicles to the mix but is everything the Hatedom claims Star Citizen is, the COVID-19 pandemic affecting development and the community's offline interactions, and of course the likely unachievable level of feature creep has not helped Star Citizen‍'‍s reputation among outsiders looking at Cloud Imperium Games from afar. Nor does the name of the official annual convention, CitizenCon. Best left at that.
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